Shelby Lynne – This year’s model
In the best tradition of purging oneself by exposing one’s darkest corners, Lynne considers Identity Crisis the most personal of her albums. “What I know is the blues — feeling ’em, singing ’em, living ’em,” she says.
But this is no twelve-bar, string-bending, wailing-white-girl blues album. Not at all. When Lynne says it’s her blues — my blues — she’s talking about pain-and-release, not musical formula. Her arrangements draw on much broader influences, but the lyrics expand on a theme stated in one of the standout lines from I Am Shelby Lynne: “What the hell’s wrong with living without the blues?”
The album’s opener, “Telephone”, is one of a couple new songs that sound as if they could’ve come from I Am. “I love that groove, it feels good,” she says of the song. “It’s funny to me that on a lot of these songs, I put all these feel-good grooves on the record, because the songs are depressing as hell.”
The storyline tells of a woman phoning an embattled lover, only to be sorry about the decision as soon as she hears a hello. “Haven’t you ever done that before?” she asks. “You get this flash where you say, ‘Damn it, I’m going to call!’ But then you instantly wish you hadn’t. You were hoping all along the person wasn’t going to be there.”
Death looms large throughout Identity Crisis, even on the songs about transcendence and moving on to a better place. “10 Rocks”, an original tune in the old-time gospel style, opens with the line, “My old friend buried his mama today,” set to barrelhouse piano (courtesy Little Feat’s Bill Payne) and with a hand-clapping black church choir providing the call-and-response.
Similarly, “Buttons And Beaus”, a vaudevillian blues, opens with the cheeky lines, “Your mama’s a whore and your daddy’s dead,” then goes on to portray a money-changing hustler who’s an Olympic champ when it comes to going for the gold. Lynne sings it with a devilish, winking glee that would make old-time blues queens Bessie Smith and Alberta Hunter proud. And those are the lighter moments.
On the darker side, there’s “I Don’t Think So” and the deceptively titled “I’m Alive”. Of the former, she says, “That’s about as low down in the pits of hell as you can get, isn’t it?” The latter starts even bleaker. “That’s just flat out about wanting to kill yourself. If you don’t come back to me, I’m done, I’m outta here. ‘If I don’t get you back, I’ll fall upon a railroad track and let the steel wheels cut right through my bone,'” she sings, quoting song lyrics. “That’s real shit. I’ve been there.”
You’ve considered suicide?
“Haven’t you?” she says, and laughs bawdily. “Oh, I don’t know, man, you know how you feel when something like that is going down. You feel like you don’t want to live. I wrote some of these songs about a relationship I had years ago. That one was a heartbreaker. I had to walk out. I had to say, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.'”
So the person didn’t come back, and you didn’t kill yourself?
“She did come back,” Lynne says in a fitful, comic burst of air. “But it still didn’t work out, either.”
She pauses, thinking about what she said. “You know, it’s not that you’re going to feel that way forever. And you know it, even when you’re at your lowest. But you really don’t know how you’re going to go on. But you do.”
Even a more wistful tune, “If I Were Smart”, was inspired by the threat of death. “That one is pretty damn simple,” the songwriter says. “I had a friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. It just occurred to me, ‘Damn it, if I was smart, I wouldn’t have a heart, because it hurts too much.’ Then I thought about the Tin Man.”
Not everything is about loss and pain. As Lynne says, the grooves are often buoyant, and she balances the dark fare with more positive ideas, including a couple specifically about working toward a brighter outlook.
“Gonna Be Better” is the rockingest tune she’s ever cut, and one of the most optimistic. “It’s about traveling through life and realizing that you finally feel you’re heading in the right direction,” she says. “It’s like saying the grass is greener up ahead, only it’s about the fact that you’re the one who has to make it greener.”
She’s curious how that song will come off live. “It’s pretty loud!” she says. “It’s a funky number. I have this real cheap gut-string guitar that’s my favorite. I wrote a lot of these songs on it. It’s got the best feeling in it. The groove of that song came first, and when I started fooling around with some words, they came along pretty fast.”
But the song that expresses Lynne’s newfound peace is the closer, “One With The Sun”. “That was inspired by a [telephone] conversation I had with Willie [Nelson],” she says. “We’ve been friends a long time. He was out on the bus in California somewhere. We talked about family and life and people we’ve lost and loved. I told him I was so glad we were friends. And I said, ‘Willie, I wish you were here watching the sun come up with me.’ I told him I had a teepee in my backyard. He said, ‘Yeah, that would be great. It’d be just you and me, one with the sun.'”